Orphan pages are pages that are not linked to from anywhere else in your website. If your website is a country, then orphan pages are like its islands: they are not connected to the rest of your country through land but they belong to the same state.
How Orphan Pages Affect SEO
Sometimes you may intentionally create orphan pages such landing pages where you do not want anyone to have access to them other than through a certain advert or social media post. In this case you should mark them as “no-index” so the search engine crawlers are not going after them.
However if they are not marked as such they can have inevitable and unintentional consequences upon your SEO performance.
Some of these issues are:
1. No Page Indexing
Since there are no pages linking to your orphan pages, they can not crawl or index it. Pages that are not indexed are not going to be served in the SERP.
You might say that since crawlers also refer to the XML sitemap, they will be discovering the orphan pages anyway even if there are no internal links leading to them. While this is actually not incorrect, it is not an excuse to leave your orphan pages on their own.
2. Poor Ranking Performance
Now let’s say these orphan pages are somehow, magically or through your sitemap, indexed. Because they have no internal linking, these are not likely to perform well. We know that internal linking is one of the cornerstones of boosting a page’s SERP performance.
According to Google’s document The Anatomy of A Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Google tends to put a lot of weight on internal linking when it comes to internal linking.
In this document Google introduces a certain algorithm they call “PageRank”.
Each inbound link acts as a vote of confidence in a page’s quality and authority. The value transferred through links is known as “link equity.”
Strategically placing internal links helps distribute link equity across your website.
If a page lacks inbound internal links, it won’t benefit from the link equity of other pages on your site.
As a result, its chances of ranking well in search engines decrease, potentially leading to little or no organic traffic.
3. Poor User Experience
Since orphan pages are not accessible through menus or other webpages, the only way a user can get to them is if they know their exact URL.
Now if these pages contain important information that your users are seeking they are either going to miss the information entirely or if they get lucky, they will see it once and never be able to find it again.
How To Fix Orphan Pages
Fixing orphan pages is very simple. All you need to do is to add at least one link from a relevant page of your website to the orphan page.
The key takeaway here is to make sure you are not linking one orphan page to another. This will create a set of pages that are still orphan even though they are connected to one another. It will be like a colony of orphan pages.
It is also a bonus if the link comes from a relevant page from your website. For example if the orphan page is about a Google Ads service you provide, the link better comes from a blog about running Google Ads.
You can also delete the page entirely or set up a redirect. The redirect method is especially good if this orphan page is an old page and you have already created a new one
When it comes to orphan pages, it’s not fixing them that’s the problem, it’s finding them!
How to Discover Your Orphan Pages
Unfortunately there is no easy way to find orphan pages using Google’s tools and services. This is the most important reason why finding orphan pages is so difficult. You can use third-party services such as SEMRush or Screaming Frog to run a site audit.
You can then find your orphan pages in these reports.
If you are not sure if a page is orphan or not, you can download a list of your top internally linked pages from Google Search Console and see if the page you were suspicious about is in that list. If it is not, chances are that page is an orphan page. You can use this link to access the links report.
You can also use the URL inspection tool to see if there are any referring domains but then you will have to do this one page at a time.
Are There Scenarios Where Orphan Pages Created Intentionally?
The answer to this question is a big yes! There are many cases where you might want to have a webpage that is not accessible through the rest of your website. This is a common practice when it comes to marketing purposes. You might want to create a certain page that is slightly different from the rest of your website and is accessible from a certain advert. These are called landing pages.
You may also decide to have certain product pages for your sales campaigns or sign-up pages with one-time events or exclusive downloadable content.
Conclusion
In the end there is no set-rule on how often you should be checking for orphan pages. If you spend some time and create a comprehensive content document with areas to indicate the internal links, you can easily minimize the chances of ending up with orphan pages.
Orphan pages can affect your SEO performance so it is important to find them and address them correctly before they leave their mark on our website.
